Over the past few days or so, since around Thanksgiving time, I've been getting emails, tweets, etc from people telling me they are seeing Google showing longer snippets from the typical two line search results snippet. Truth is, Google has been messing around with snippet length for over a decade - they are constantly playing with these things.
So these users are (a) in a test group or (b) seeing a dynamic search snippet that is longer because Google feels the snippet should be longer for that query. Or maybe it is both or maybe it is a bug?
Either way, longer snippets is something Google does all the time. It seems maybe Google has dialed up the test on this and is showing more longer snippets. But I do not have data to prove that outside of the spike of folks telling me they are now seeing way longer snippets.
John Mueller of Google replied to these questions on Twitter:
We're always working on search, there's not really anything specific to say there. I don't think we ever had a limit on description meta tag content length.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) November 28, 2017
Snippets have pretty much always been dynamic. Counting characters isn't really a good use of your time there.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) November 28, 2017
@rustybrick Hi Barry! We've been seeing very strange SERPs full of uber long descriptions for the last few days. Dunno if it's just a thing in Spain, or everywhere. I just asked John Mueller about it and didn't deny it, this is what he said: https://t.co/84QKi2NBRs pic.twitter.com/Qci1xi89ER
— Juan González Villa (@seostratega) November 28, 2017
So if you see longer snippets, you are not alone.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: RankRanger has been tracking this as well and has shown significant increases in length here:
Another huge increase in the average length of meta-descriptions as Google organic results see lengthier descriptions across the world: https://t.co/2DtNsvZkO4 #SEO pic.twitter.com/XNbae1oBgk
— Rank Ranger (@RankRanger) November 29, 2017
Update 2: Google confirmed they did do an update here, a spokesperson said:
We recently made a change to provide more descriptive and useful snippets, to help people better understand how pages are relevant to their searches. This resulted in snippets becoming slightly longer, on average.
